Łomża

Between the ages of nine and eleven, Lutosławski would travel to Łomża once a week for piano lessons with Alina Rudnicka. He did not have the best memories of those lessons, since his new teacher, regarding the boy’s hand positions, set by her predecessor in Warsaw, as ill-advised, told him to go back to five-finger exercises, in order to set her pupil’s hand in the way that she preferred. That ruined the boy’s pleasure from playing. Yet it was under her tuition that in 1922 the young Witold wrote his first compositions, including a Prelude that he wrote out himself – with Rudnicka’s help. That piece is now lost, like all his compositional exercises.